Flickr

Ah, character design. Though I haven’t (yet) been involved in a big project in this area, I love it. I have been involved though with some corporate mascots, and recently with the characters in an animation short.

This wormy character is a mascot I created for a printing company, thus his body is made of the four colors of the printing process. He leaves a little trail of four-color printing.

This grumpy character is the result of a quick sketch on my tablet PC. I was thinking of Guatón Loyola (Fat Loyola), a popular character of chilean folklore. I was trying to create a relatively disneyesque character who was unmistakeably for animation. Even though I only dedicated a few minutes to this character I believe it was a decent first approach.

This little guy is quite obviously a chip, of the kind that you will find plenty off on motherboards and almost every electronic device. Thus, his appropriateness as a mascot for a technology blog.

Similarly this one is a fly with a chip for a body, a mini usb-port for a mouth and conductive pathways (from printed circuit boards) on its wings. A bit more serious and much less charismatic than the previous character.

Finally, and on a lighter side, I sent to engadget this version of the late Clippy, all dressed up in engadget garb. At the time, Clippy had become quite popular after Microsoft’s decision to remove him from Office 07 (effectively killing him). Perhaps he could have escaped death and become a refugee at engadget.

This is King Midas, from a short animation I made quite a few years ago. He is the character from the popular greek story of King Midas, the one who turned everything he touched into gold. As you might guess just by looking at him, this was a twisted and perverted version of the folk character, and not quite in ancient Greece. He was purposefully black and white (as was the whole animation) and evil looking.

This is Whopper, a character created for the web-based fantasy role playing game Dicing Dangers. The cartoony style was chosen to maintain coherence with the game’s imagery, and was further simplified since this character’s final destination would be a lowly 100 x 100px image. The sword and the hand holding it were drawn apart from the rest of the character to allow for the easy replacement of the weapon. This character was very well received by the community, receiving several compliments.

This is Thurid, a valkyrie. This is a very early test for a character on a large animation project, drawn and painted in Alias Sketchbook Pro and textured in Photoshop. The outfit came out too modern, and the hair style and the character’s age will also be revised.

And this is a character drawn by Daniel Walker, a fellow designer, for a mutual project. This was originally a black and white drawing which was colored and textured by me in Adobe Photoshop.